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Canada Loses North Pole
An anonymous reader submits "The Earth's roaming magnetic pole has moved out of Canada and into international waters as it heads towards Siberia. The magnetic pole has been within Canada's current boundaries for at least the past 400 years and left sometime in the past year after rapidly picking up speed in 2001. If it keeps to its current course and expected speed, it should reach Siberia by the middle of the century. There's speculation that December's tsunami causing earthquake may have been one of the factors causing the pole to move more quickly than predicted."
Good day, gentlemen. As you are no doubt aware, I have perfected a device capable of manipulating the earth's magnetic field. This device has already shifted the position of the earth's poles by a significant margin, and will continue to do so, eventually forcing the poles to swap positions entirely. For this reason, I've christened this latest caper 'Operation Roly-Poley'...
You see, gentlemen, Operation Roly-Poley will continue to destabilize the magnetic field of our fragile world, causing geological and meteorological disturbances on a global scale...that is, of course...unless you pay me...
One hundred billion kajillion fafillion dollaaaars!
(cue dramatic music)
Gentlemen, you have my demands...peace out.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
in a shocking turn of events, Santa Claus takes advantage of his new out-of-borders workshop and cuts elf wages by 50%
I didn't realize that Peter North was Canadian.
no more "ho ho ho eh"?
Canada didn't lose it, they merely outsourced it offshore.
Why does everyone always blame Canada?
Maybe they didn't lose it, maybe it was stolen, maybe it snuck off on it's own, maybe it's just on summer vacation.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
the north pole follows you...
it had to be said.
flinging poop since 1969
And Canada is like... "whats going on ey?"
That's probably why the word "current" was used.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Several writers have suggested that a "polar shift" may occur in the near future. While I'm not a geophysicist myself, perhaps that is what we are seeing: a reverse in polarity of the north and south magnetic poles.
It will happen in the close future. Actually, it'll flip-flop back and forth a few times before settling down in a reverse manner.
While it's doing that, we'll be exposed to quite a bit more radiation than usual since the magnetic field is what stops most of the nasty radiation.
This may explain quite a few questions about significant mutations and the fact that they often happen quite quickly.
I do have the feeling that the magnetic field has quite an effect on the brain (intelligence in particular...the brain relies on electricity and magnetism effects this) and that the lessening of the field (what happens before a reverse) may effecting us quite a bit now.
The magnetic field North-South was quite strong when recorded civilization did some incredible things that modern technology still hasn't completely puzzled out. The field is much more weak now than it was when they did those incredible things.
Oddly enough, even with the extremely large population we have, we don't have nearly as many (proportionally) 'out of the box' thinking people that existed in previous recorded history.
Here is a good link http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/magnetic/
BTW: I'm much more concerned with a polarity shift or no shielding at all than a random asteroid mucking up our planet.
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
Are taking their toll
I even get excited when I see the North Pole
See the North Pole...
I'm the only gay Eskimo
Only gay Eskimo
I'm the only one I know
The only one I know-oh-oh-oh
I'm the only gay Eskimo
In my tribe
Only gay eskimo, eh.
Money for nothing, pix for free
To play devils advocate - do you have statistics on "out of the box" thinking for different periods in history? I think the way modern progress is made, by teams and groups of researchers doing much more much faster in many differnt places all at once is making much, much faster progress than at any period in history - specifically becuase it does not depend on a "breakthough" by one specific amazing thinker. Perhaps modern advancement just requires so much more knowledge and work than a single person seeing things in a rush of insight is likely to have, and thus modern progress is accomplished differently.
God I hope not. I'm way too old to learn how to read maps upside down.
For what it's worth, I am a geophysicist...
If by "polar shift", you mean a magnetic reversal, then one will happen, sooner or later. The main field appears to be weaking slowly at the moment. On the other hand, the actual location of the magnetic pole is continually shifting.
Another poster gave a link to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/magnetic/reversals.ht ml. If you look at some of the quicktime animations of a reversal in progress, you can see what happens to the field at the Earth's surface. The dominant feature of the current field is a dipole field - which is why the field can be nicely approximated to a bar magnet. As a reversal takes place, the dipole component of the field falls in strength, and quadrapole and then octopole features start to dominate - meaning there won't be an actual pair of poles.
The original poster said;
This is mentioned in the original article. Although not impossible, I would tend to think it's pretty unlikely (but my speciality is seismology now, not geomagnetism). Big subduction zone earthquakes, which produce a significant vertical movement of mass, do affect the earth's moment of inertia. This leads to (small) changes in rotation speed and the orientation of the rotation pole. This is because the moment of inertia is dependant on the mass distribtion of the entire earth.
The magnetic field is produced in the liquid outer core. It's in constant motion. There's also a difference in the net rotation of the core relative to the rest of the earth, which causes a continual westward drift of the field. This means the poles are always moving. Ships have been measuring the declination between geographic and magnetic north for centuries - the movement of the magnetic pole isn't uniform.
True, but did you notice that the North Pole left Canada silently?
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.